This print for content only-size & color not accurate 7" X 9-1/4" / casebound / malloy

■

Note

There are many other elements and notations that may appear in C# XML code comments. If you are

interested in more details, look up the topic “XML Documentation Comments (C# Programming Guide)” within the

.NET Framework SDK 3.5 documentation.

Transforming XML Code Comments via NDoc

Now that you have generated an *.xml file that contains your source code comments, you may be

wondering exactly what to do with it. Sadly, Visual Studio 2008 does not provide a built-in utility

that transforms XML data into a more user-friendly help format (such as an HTML page). If you are

comfortable with the ins and outs of XML transformations, you are, of course, free to manually cre-

ate your own style sheets.

A simpler alternative, however, are the numerous third-party tools that will translate an XML

code file into various helpful formats. For example, recall from Chapter 2 that the NDoc application

generates documentation in several different formats. Assuming you have this tool installed, the

first step is to specify the location of your *.xml file and the corresponding assembly. To do so, click

the Add button of the NDoc GUI. This will open the dialog box shown in Figure 5-15.

Figure 5-15.

Specifying the XML file and corresponding assembly

At this point, you can select for output location (via the OutputDirectory property) and docu-

ment type (via the Documentation Type drop-down list). For this example, let’s pick an MSDN-

CHM format, which will generate documentation that looks and feels identical to the .NET

Framework 3.5 documentation (see Figure 5-16).

C H A P T E R   5